How I Became a Good Cook

When graduated high school I was not known for my domestic skills.  I had taken Home Economics classes and passed them, although a great deal of my grades were dependent simply on effort and not the actual outcome.  My cooking abilities at home were kind of a family joke.  Occasionally I would end up fixing dinner for the family when my parent's were able to due to their jobs, but if it didn't come out of a box I did not make it (and even then there was a chance it would be over or undercooked).  Baking was about the only area I felt semi-confident in, but even there I was sloppy and while my treats came out tasty they did not often come out pretty.  This was okay though, I was planning on going to college, getting a degree landing a great job in some metropolitan area and living a grand single life of eating out.

I has been thirteen years, four kitchens, one eating disorder, three children, one marriage and countless cookbooks since then... and I am still shocked when my husband compliments my cooking to a new acquaintance.  It is even more shocking when I get rave reviews on something I have brought to a potluck (compliments from people who are not linked to me by vows under God, you know...).  Becoming a good cook was never something had actively thought about working on.  I never showed any natural talent for it, but overtime I just began to pick up on things and fell slowly in love with my kitchen and the process of preparing food for my family. 

This is how adorable I envision myself in the kitchen :)

   by  esotericsean 

Although I did not know it, this process probably really began when I got my first apartment in college.  I can recall going shopping with my roommate and nearly swatting her hand from reaching for a jar of Ragu.  I am fussy about my spaghetti sauce, my mother made the sauce that went on our table and I have never developed a taste for bottles of premade sauce.  So I directed her to cans of tomato sauce, paste and a good collection of spices.  Later that week I made my first pot of spaghetti by myself.  For a long time my cooking came in small spatters.  I would get excited about a recipe, get the ingredients, try it and gauge the results (sometimes great, sometimes awful).  Between those moments of inspiration we ate out or I went back to the old habit of cooking from a box or a can. 

When I decided to be a stay at home mom though things really began to shift.  Suddenly I was home during the day and had more time to plan, shop, prep and actually cook meals.  Making food for my little baby boy became important to me.  Now that I have yet another child and I am living out in a rural area of North Dakota cooking has gained even more importance, knowing how to make a meal from scratch is going to help us survive our first winter up here.  It also might help me keep my sanity as I have come to really truly love cooking. 

How did I get to this point, though?  As I have stated it was not a planned endeavor, just something I have fallen into, but here are some tips that might help if you are being more thoughtful about your desires to be a better cook.

 

Watch People Cook

I do not just mean cooking shows, although they certainly can be a way to learn great things.  However I find cooking shows to be too 'perfect' for my tastes often.  Their kitchens are perfectly laid out, the ingredients for the meals are all prepared ahead of time in cute little ramekins, the mistakes and the clean up are all edited out.  Cooking shows are about getting inspiration, not about real cooking. 

No I mean watch real people cook.  Sit in the kitchen on Thanksgiving, help a friend make dinner at their house (or yours), volunteer at a soup kitchen... anything you can do to watch someone else cook a meal.  You start learning techniques, and that is what this is all about.  Seeing how your aunt peels potatoes, or how your best friend boils eggs.  These are things you need to pay attention to.

I definitely need to cook with this lady!

   by  Hooray I'm Helping 

 

And this lady... just maybe not both of them at the same time...

   by  cszar 

Cookbooks, Lots of Cookbooks

First I recommend that every single house needs a good basic cookbook.  Mine is the Fannie Farmer cookbook that used to belong to my grandmother (it still has bookmarks in it made from 1960's newspaper clippings and coupon books).  This is a great no frills cookbook.  It tells me how to make waffle mix, how to boil corn, and make muffins.  You will not find recipes like 'Stuffed Cinnamon and Vanilla French Toast', 'Pastry Wrapped Salmon Tarts', or 'Double Chocolate Salted Caramel Brownies'.  No this book just gives you the basics, but that that is what you really need to learn how to cook, the rest is all added fluff you can add on once you get those basics figured out.

Secondly I recommend devouring cook books.  I have a small collection that I have bought or been given as gifts, and then I dive into the shelves at the library and supplement with those as well.  However, lately I have discovered that cookbooks are not for collecting recipes.  Shocker!  I can do that anywhere, the internet is my favorite place to look up new delectable recipes.  What I use cook books for is their wealth of information.  Skim over the recipes, if one really catches your fancy make it, but read the introduction.  Getting cook books on a specific topic (I picked up one today on garlic) is best.  Learn all about that topic, learn about baking bread, learn about roasting, learn about cheese and wine and seafood.  The knowledge contained before and between the recipes in a cookbook can be difficult to find elsewhere and it's pure gold. 

Be Fearless

I grew up in a home where beef was served well done.  Whereas my husband grew up in a home where beef was served rare, on Christmas Eve each year his mother makes Prime Rib that is served to the table with a bloody circle pooling at the bottom of the dish (this took some time for me to get used to, and I still get the edge piece although I am finding beef is better pink than black). 

My husband loves his meat this way.  I was intimidated.  Fearful that any attempt to properly roast beef would end up in a charcoal-like mess (an expensive mess with the cost of beef currently), so I steered away from it.  Then one year my husband bought a quarter of a cow to stow in our freezer.  I was still scared and ended up putting most of the roasts in the crock pot and cooking them into tender stews.  This was good, but my husband complained that it was still probably a waste of a good cut of meat.  He was right, so when we went in on half a cow the next year I was determined to give up my fear of roasts and learn how to properly cook beef.  I went to the library and picked up 'All About Roasting' (I would check this book out three times and it is currently sitting on my Christmas list because I probably just need a copy on hand), and began my journey.  The first attempt was actually good.  Not great, but edible and my husband praised it.  As I made my way through the little white packages in the freezer I started getting more comfortable with my talents as a roaster.  I have yet to do a Prime Rib, but that has mostly been due to budget instead of fear.  One day I will splurge and throw one in the oven. 

This is how you make progress with your cooking skills, dive in.  Make mistakes and keep on trying.  I now make sourdough bread regularly, I roast, I bake, I make sauces, and even lasagna. 


This is not the end, I still have some things to figure out.  While I can make a mean sourdough from scratch I seem to be currently unable to make cut biscuits that rise, and I have yet to really master any kind of baked dish with a red sauce (they almost always end up too dry).  I am working on learning how to do more things from scratch and how to properly store my food so it is easier to use when it comes time to do actual cooking.  But I finally have a good set of skills under my belt and with some reading and experimenting I know I will figure it out someday.

Makeup Bag Woes

'What can I do to reduce the size of the makeup bag in my purse?'

   by  Hayley.Bolan 

This was the question I recently saw posed in the advice section of a magazine.  What came next was a paragraph or so on some products that served double duties and/or came in small compact containers. 

My first thought was, 'wear less makeup'.  My second thought was, 'or hell... even none'. 

That would certainly save a lot of space in your purse.  Of course the magazine was not about to suggest such a thing, and risk offending some of their best advertising partners.  I however, do not have to worry about such things.

Makeup.  Makeup.  Makeup.

As if I did not have enough reminders that I am not living up to the standard of beauty enough already, the makeup industry makes certain to plaster their reminders just about everywhere.  Nothing about my face seems to be right, and there is a product out there that will solve that.  Mascara for my eye lashes, creams and powders to smooth out my complexion, more powders to enlighten my eyes and cheeks, pencils to outline and redraw, lipsticks to brighten my lips... etc... etc... etc...

Admittedly I do look prettier with makeup on.  And yes I own a small bag of makeup, I know the basics of how to put it on.  That bag only comes out maybe once a month, and sometimes closer to once every two or three months.  Usually when I go out for a nice dinner or some 'formal' occasion.  Even then I tend to go very conservative and the makeup I do end up taking with me in my purse would probably make the woman who wrote into the magazine shudder, because it consists of a tube of lip gloss (not even full lipstick usually, just some glittery gloss to toss on after I am done eating). 

Every now and then I decide, typically after an event where I wear makeup and get lots of compliments about how nice I look (because you know normally I'm sporting ratting stay-at-home mom style), that I am going to try and wear a little more makeup regularly.  I will try to dab on some mascara (my eyelashes match my hair, thin and gingery) in the morning, or I will keep the glittery gloss in my purse to use instead of chap stick, or if I am feeling awfully brave I might even try to powder my face twice a day.  These efforts end pretty quickly.  I start to realize I hate taking off mascara, and it causes little sty's to appear on my eyelids.  The glittery gloss gets lost in the many transfers of my stuff between diaper bags and purses.  As for the powder, I find I have better things to do with my life than reapply makeup all day and it bothers me to touch my face and find stuff on it. 

So most of the time I just give it up.  My kids do not care if I wear it, my husband does not really (and honestly I think he prefers me not to so he doesn't get covered in whenever he tries to kiss or touch me), it saves me a lot of money, and my skin is probably healthier for it anyway. 

Go ahead society, judge me by the size of my makeup bag, or lack there of... I have better things to concern myself with.

Posting Blame for my Eating Disorder

Many college freshman end up with the fabled 'Freshmen Fifteen' after their first year of college.  An additional fifteen pounds wrapped around their young frames that comes with partying and poor eating choices under their first real taste of 'freedom'.  I did just the opposite though.  I lost fifteen pounds, fifteen pounds I could not afford, since I began college at maybe 115 lbs.  My eating disorder did not appear when I got to college, it simply got completely out of control when I got there. 

One of the lower points I experienced then was the evening I wound up sitting on the floor of dorm laundry mat.  I was tired, I was hungry, I was shaking from malnutrition and fear, and I was balling my eyes out.  The boy I was madly in love with (I think he suspected something but had yet to say anything about it) was staring at me, wondering what in the world was going on.  Eventually I admitted that I had a problem, that I wanted to eat, I needed to eat, but I simply couldn't make myself eat.  The boy, bless his soul, did his best to comfort me and I did eventually calm down.  It was a low, but I still really did not understand how far I was falling. 

A few weeks later I was at my parents house for winter break, and finally caught sight of myself in a full length mirror as I got ready to step into the shower.  The view stopped me in my tracks.  What stared back at me was not a cute shapely 19 year old who was preparing for medical school and had it all together.  Instead it was bordering on a skeleton.  My ribs and hips poked out of pale thin skin, my eyes seemed sunken in.  I was frail and broken.  I cried a lot more that day. 

When I got back to school I began looking for help.  My university had free counseling available, so I called their office and got set up with a counselor.  He sent me to the campus health clinic where I met with a nutritionist (who suggested I eat as much fatty food as I could, she said peanut butter was my friend).  So I was working toward recovery, but the gears seemed to move slowly.  I would do okay for a few days and then would slip right back. 

My counselor talked to me a lot, he went over relaxation techniques and asked about what in my life was bothering me so much.  So I started delving deep into my life, trying to find the source of my eating problems.  As with most people there were a lot of possible reasons. 

However, one day I sat down with a hot dog, a hot dog that would kind of change my life.  I stared at it, my nemesis.  A roll of sausage wrapped in a white bun and slathered with some ketchup.  It was mocking me, I could feel it.  I imagined how it would squish and feel slightly rubbery in my mouth, how hard it was going to be swallowing it, and even worse how the chunks might taste as they came back up in half an hour.  The hot dog was wining, I was losing my appetite.  Suddenly though a voice from somewhere deep down inside of me spoke up. 

   by  Jason McKim 

 

"Samantha.  This is stupid.  It is a hot dog.  Eat it, move on with your life.  YOU are starving yourself."

The truth that voice had mentally uttered was astounding.  I was starving myself.  No one else was.  I could trying laying the blame for what I was going through on everyone else. 

I could say it was because I was a military brat and my father was gone a lot.  I could say it was because my parents had a very rocky marriage to which I was witness.  Or I could say it was because my grandparents and other grown up's had been trying to make me eat more all my life.  Maybe it was because I was teased a lot by other kids growing up.  Maybe it was because my mother yelled a lot.  Maybe my friends were not as supportive as they could have been.  Maybe the college was not as supportive as it could have been.  The problem also could have laid with society, and the excessive pressure it put on girls to be popular, pretty and perfect.  Or maybe I could claim the problem was a lack of education on the issues of eating disorders that had left me unable to handle my situation.

But that was all bull.  It was ME.  I was the one who was not eating the hot dog.  No one was stopping me from eating.  And even though it felt like it, there was nothing actually physically wrong with me.  I was broken, inside, and it was my fault.  I had let everything around me poison me. 

When I realized that this was my fault, that I had caused my own eating disorder, I also realized that I was the only one who was going to fix it.  No one else could make me eat, sure if it got bad enough I could be force fed through a tube, but that was only a temporary solution.  Likewise I could not do anything to change what had happened to me, or even what I was currently living with.  Waiting around for the world or people to change before I could change meant I was going to starve. 

The change had to come from me.  So I took a deep breath and told myself to stop being stupid and eat the dumb hot dog.  Bite by bite I did.  It took awhile, and it would be another several months before I could eat a meal without reminding myself that I had to.  But it worked. 

I took responsibility for my eating disorder, and in doing so I also took on the responsibility for curing myself.

Parenting Fail: Baby in a Box

The purpose of this blog is to be honest, to strip the lies and get down to what we are really about.

Sometimes being a parent means we pretend to be perfect.  Dress the kids up, shove all the dirt under the carpet, unwrap some store bought muffins and toss them in a basket so it looks like you baked them and act like everything is under control.  But come on... we are all just making this up as we go and along the way we make some mistakes.  Some of those mistakes are small, others are large... I am going to stop the pretending, be honest and share some of mine (although the muffins on the counter probably are homemade...). 

July 1, 2014

I put my baby girl (18 months old, whom I shall call Little Bit) down for her nap after lunch.  My son did not want to play in his room and I decided I was not going to argue with him, so he was playing train on the floor while I ate my lunch, worked on the computer and watched a little TV.  This sounds wonderful right? 

Well it was until I thought I heard a noise coming from upstairs, a noise like Little Bit crying.  I paused and listened some more, trying to gauge how serious this was before getting up.  After a few moments or so I could still hear her, but it was pretty muffled.  Mommy alarms started going off, concerned I paused the show and headed upstairs.  The closer I got the more concerned I got as the crying seemed muffled and yet pretty hysterical. 

As I opened the door I started doing a quick survey of the room... Little Bit was not in her bed... I did not see her on the floor... where was my baby...?  And then I saw her, or at least part of her.  Her two little legs, kicking and sticking out of the top of a box I had put in her room to hold some of her toys.  Apparently she had reached inside for a toy on the bottom and had fallen in and gotten stuck.  I rushed over to her and pulled her out... poor crying red faced baby who had also gotten so scared that she had thrown up in this awful upside down state. 

   by  Etolane 

I immediately checked my tiny Little Bit over and she was okay, breathing fine and no longer throwing up.  Quickly I cleaned her up and then just held her, curling up in my bed until I got her to calm back down. 

Response

Once I got Little Bit calmed down and felt certain that everything was going to be okay I realized that I needed to learn from this harrowing experience. 

The first thing was the box she had fallen into.  I had misjudged how tall and narrow it was in comparison to her little body, so when she toppled into it she was unable to push herself back up and out of it.  That box has already made it into the trash pile and is no longer in my house.  Since then I have replaced it with a plastic milk crate, these boxes are lower and wider than the old box.  The toys fill the space better and Little Bit should be able to get herself back out of it if she were to fall in again. 

Second was installing the baby monitor in the room again.  I had thought that I could hear well enough between the floors (the walls are thin here) but again I had misjudged things.  The baby monitor came back out and was put back in the room.  It did not do well with the move, and is pretty full of static, so a new one is on its way from Amazon.  Nothing fancy mind you, but enough to keep me better appraised of what is going on upstairs. 

Crisis solved and hopefully avoided in the future (at least that one... we shall see what new crisis they invent for me tomorrow).

Why I am a Stay At Home Mom

   by  ECohen 
 

I just finished reading this article on the rising numbers of stay at home moms and felt inspired to share how I became a stay at home mom.

When my husband and I decided to try and get pregnant I just knew deep down inside of me that I couldn't bear to leave my children with someone else for 40 hours a week.  Personally I felt that if I was going to have children I should be the one to raise them.  So the ideal for me would be to stop working once our first born was finally here.  How that was actually going to work out I wasn't sure. 

It took us awhile to get a stable pregnancy underway, nearly a year an a half (perhaps another day I will go into that story), but finally I was in the second trimester of my pregnancy and started looking into what it would take to stay home with my son.  Which is of course when my husband got laid off from his job.  He was an apprentice electrician at the time and there were few open jobs thanks the recession.  We kept crossing our fingers and praying that things would work out.

I was seven months pregnant when our health insurance, through his union, was running out, he was still unemployed and due to my denial we had nothing worked out for my son once he arrived.  Terrified beyond belief I started the process to get onto the health insurance through my job and began looking into day care facilities. 

This process scared me even more it turned out.  I was making about $13 an hour at my job, full time, but with little potential for overtime or a raise (those got frozen with the recession too).  The job required me to make a 20 minute commute each way.  Moving the health insurance to my job also meant that $200 dollars a month would be going to there instead of my pocket.  Child care for infants in my area ran around $250 a week, about half of my paycheck.  Once you added the extra gas I would be spending driving to and from the child care facility and work, general baby expenses, the health care and probably formula (my office would accommodate my pumping, but there were few places appropriate for it and I was not sure how I would do keeping it up) there was really nothing left of my paycheck, and there was still the mortgage, utilities, car payments, and upcoming medical bills.  I came to greatly admire single parents during this search...

In the eighth month our miracle happened, my husband finally got a job.  This was one week before our insurance actually ran out and he was able to keep it active so I did not have to apply for the insurance through my job.  We still were not sure how stable this job was and if we could make it on his paycheck alone, he was making roughly $20 an hour but that was after all the union expenses were taken out. 

I was also beginning to wonder if I could actually stay home and stay sane.  During the last trimester of my pregnancy I was experiencing a lot of contractions and my doctor ordered me to take it easy, I started working half days at home, only going into the office for 4 hours at a time.  That meant I sat around at home a lot, and it was starting to drive me crazy.  Cabin fever started edging in on me and I began to wonder if trying to work part time might be a viable option for me.

Then it finally happened, I went into labor (two days after my due date).  I actually went into work that morning.  They laughed at me, I was due to have a baby two days prior, but I could not sit around the house anymore, I had to get out, so I went in for a few hours and then went home.  I watched TV and made muffins.  Those muffins turned out to be a godsend because they were the last thing I ate before going into labor for the next twelve hours.  By the next morning I was cradling my beautiful baby boy, and feeling the pressure of responsibility his little presence placed on me like a great big weight. 

We went home and I began my maternity leave.  It was a cold winter and we were stuck in the house most of the time.  However I quickly discovered that I was not going stir crazy like I had thought I would.  With the baby around I found I was actually enjoying my stuck in the house time.  It gave me a great opportunity to really bond with the little guy, and I found I could spend hours just watching him sleep.  Plus I was no longer under medical directions to take it easy, so I could do the laundry and the dishes and other projects between nursing baby boy.  I took to being home with him so well that my husband laughed when our pediatrician told him to look out for signs of post partum depression.  He said that I had the opposite... I was miserable during the last few weeks of my pregnancy, but as soon as I gave birth I became a happy vibrant mommy. 

So as the weeks turned to months I realized I needed to make a decision and let my job know when, or if, I was going to return to work.  My maternity pay had been very minimal, I think they cut me a check for $1,000 for the 6 weeks they covered.  Most of that went straight to the hospital bills for the delivery.  Otherwise we had been living on my husband's paychecks for two months, and it looked like the job was actually working out.  We crunched some numbers and realized that if I went back to work full time I would maybe bring home $100 a week after child care and gas expenses.  If I only worked part time that amount would drop even lower as the gas prices wouldn't go down but my paycheck would.  The office was not interested in letting me continue to work from home regularly, so that was not an option for us.  I also started to realize that if I stayed home I could work on saving us money, by making our food from scratch, and devoting more time into projects like rehabbing things in our house and researching coupons.  Not to mention I was pretty certain now that I wanted to stay home and that going to work was going to break my heart. 

Finally we decided that it just made more sense for me to stay home.  I called the office and gave them my notice.  The small amount of money I would be bringing in just was not worth it for us.    Since then the old job has called me up a few times and I did some independent contract work for them, mostly at home, although for about a month when my husband was again between jobs I did go in for a few hours a week to help with some backlog.  That has occasionally helped out with our finances but it has never been something to count on.  Now that we have moved out of state it really isn't an option anymore and I have started dabbling in this blogging thing, although we shall see how, if, it helps with our finances any.    Other than that I have been a full time mom, and I don't regret it.

This job has been nothing like I expected it to be.  I work harder than I ever have before.  I am tired, dirty and stressed out most of the time.  I do not get paid for any of this.  I get yelled at and peed on on a regular basis... but it's wonderful.  I plan on keeping this up for at least another four years (when my daughter is due for Kindergarten) and from there we shall see. 

This Mamma Doesn't Mess Around with Bedtime - and the Surprising Reason Why

   by  Andrew Stawarz 
 

I will not start this by saying that bedtime is a smoothly oiled machine in my house.  I have a three and a half year old son and an 18 month old daughter, so there are plenty of antics.  Like any parent of small children I have carried sopping wet, screaming and kicking toddlers from the bath and into their rooms, forced pajama's on them, shut off the light, closed the door and prayed on the other side that they wouldn't come pounding on the door the next moment, and they usually do.  However, bedtime is not a place where I give in easily. 

Other parents have different philosophies when it comes to bedtime.  Their children stay up with them until the wee hours in the morning sometimes.  Hours are spent getting drinks, bathroom breaks, new stuffed animals, one more story, one more show etc... before the kid finally collapses into their bed.  Or the kids never even make it to their own beds and snuggle up with mom and dad in the big bed.  These things don't work for me, but who am I to judge if they work for you? 

For us though, getting those kids to bed at a decent hour is absolutely essential.  The reason it is essential is not for the kids though.  It's for us, for my husband and I.  Sure there are probably benefits to getting kids into a regular sleep schedule, and refusing to give up and let them dictate the situation likely has some good discipline and life lesson benefits as well.  But in the end it comes down to the preservation of our marriage that makes me so determined to win this battle. 

Evenings are family time in our house.  My husband works long hard hours but is home most nights in time for dinner so I always try to make sure that the few hours we have each night go well.  We eat dinner, all of us, at the table.  After dinner everyone chips in on clean up.  If there is time my husband and son will watch some television together then the bedtime routine starts.  Bath's if necessary, brushing teeth, changing diapers and taking potty trips, determining what to wear to bed (here I am ultra flexible, as long as it isn't going to strangle them while they sleep I pretty much allow whatever they want), bedtime stories and songs... then the lights go out and it is officially sleep time.  For the kids that is.

When their evening with dad ends my evening with my husband begins.  This is a special time for my husband and I.  We have a Netflix account and always have a show that we are binging on, luckily we have enough common interest in television shows to make this possible.  So we get something to drink and maybe snack on, grab a blanket and snuggle up on the couch to watch an episode or two of our latest fix (currently we are into the original Star Trek series).  We talk during the show, about the show, about our friends and family, about the kids, about work, about whatever weird thing we read on the internet or heard on the radio... whatever.  We talk, we snuggle, we watch TV.  We have been doing this since before we even started dating.  Back when we were just college friends we did this, and I wanted to make sure we didn't lose it just because we had kids. 

   by  andrewrennie 

It doesn't always work out perfectly, life never allows that.  Just last night Star Trek had to be stopped twice to tend to my son before he finally settled down.  But each time he was redirected to his room and we came back downstairs and picked up where we left off.  The important thing is that we are trying, trying to connect with each other each day and trying to keep alive the memories of when we were young and so much in love we couldn't even fathom being apart.  We need this time, so our children must get to bed.